Are you being perfectionist?

My wife and I were staining our kitchen cabinets and giving them a totally new look. The originals were the old-school “honey oak” color and we were looking to turn them into more of an expresso look with new handles.

Anyway, it is a tough job. Requires about 3 coats of the gel stain (on both sides of all the doors)…. and each coat has to dry 12-24 hours before a new one can go on. THEN you have to do a couple coats of a polyurethane top coat.

Needless to say, it is a tedious time-consuming work. And after days and DAYS of working on it, you are really ready for it to just be over with!

The funny part is that…. well, it is rather difficult to make a perfect finish with stain. No recoloring of a cabinet is going to be quite like the original. So, while we’re working on it, we’re seeing imperfections.

We could see brush streaks. We could see little spots that seem to have been missed.

And because my wife was working all-out on this thing, she had cabinets on the brain. 🙂 So, she’d go into the kitchen and immediately begin to see the little imperfections.

Mind you, nobody else would ever notice! But, she did. She was looking for them.

But, toward the end of this massive job, it did get to a point where we just wanted to be done with it. Like, we find another little spot that could be fixed? Ah, screw it!

We stopped seeking perfection.

And honestly, unless you came in and investigated our cabinets up close and looked for problems, you’d think they were built that way. I mean, honestly, the final job looks REALLY nice. 🙂 I’m happy with it.

But, isn’t this what a lot of us do in our businesses?

Or with our blogs?

You ever found yourself spending hours – if not days – tweaking your blog theme and trying out different plugins? You tell yourself it is all for some kind of purpose, but then…. that purpose isn’t really defined.

I mean, what IS perfection, anyway? Can you even define exactly what perfection looks like?

In many cases (probably most), the answer is no. Perfection is unattainable. Nothing is absolute. In the end, no matter how “good” something is, there’s always some tweak you could do to make it better.

At a certain point, you just have to define what “done” means and… GET IT DONE!

Stop trying to make it perfect.

Just like with our cabinets, it is highly likely that the ONLY person who will ever notice imperfections is YOU.

So, whether you’re talking about that next blog post, a product you’re creating, a video you’re editing, an email you’re writing…

… don’t seek perfection. It doesn’t exist, so stop chasing it.

Just get it done. Get it out there.

Like my grandfather always said to me, the only sure-fire way never to catch a fish is not to have your hook in the water.

So, get the job done and drop your hook in the water. You can always make it better later if you want.

– David